Modern Irish Fiction

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to this Handbook’s central concern: the major lines of development of Irish fiction during the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. It sets out the book’s aims and objectives and provides cogent summaries of each of its chapters. In the process, it considers the significance of certain influential novelists and their works; highlights some of the distinctive thematic preoccupations of Ireland’s novelists and short story writers; discusses prominent literary trends and genres; and guides the reader through salient critical commentary. The analysis suggests that, in the hands of successive generations of Irish writers, the novel, the literary genre with newness at its etymological core, continually renews itself by absorbing, dethroning, and transforming precedent.

John Banville’s Fictions of Art

This chapter discusses the fiction of John Banville, presenting the case that his complex meditations on the significance of art are central to a proper understanding of his aesthetic formation and development. In order to show how Banville’s work has consistently sought to explore the relationship between the mysteries of art and the enigmas of human experience, the chapter examines a wide range of his fiction, from his metafictional novels of the early 1970s, through the science tetralogy of novels published between 1976 and 1986, to his Frames trilogy of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his post-2000 fiction, including The Sea (2005) and the series of crime novels Banville has published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

Obliquities

This chapter explores how obliquity functions as both a narrative mode and a literary style in the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. It contends that, for Bowen, confrontations with history and modernity are best handled indirectly and tactfully, to the point that obliquity becomes a signature of her short story style. The early part of the chapter outlines Bowen’s poetics of the short story. Her thinking on the short story is compared with that of her compatriots, Seán O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, whose stories informed her discussion of ‘national imprint’ in a class on short fiction that she taught at Vassar College in 1960. The latter part of the chapter analyses how Bowen develops an aesthetics of oblique representation of Irish history in her own fiction, with particular reference to ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘A Love Story 1939’, two stories set during the Second World War.

Post-Millennial Irish Fiction

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish fiction has engaged with some of the defining developments in the Republic of Ireland since the turn of the millennium. It charts the experimentations in form and content that define much of Ireland’s recent fiction, as well as the ways in which writers refine and revisit the traditions of the Irish novel. In addition to tracing changes and continuities in the work of established authors such as Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, and Colm Tóibín, the chapter examines the formal and thematic choices of the newer generation that has come to prominence since 2000. The analysis finds that a unifying feature of this body of fiction is a prevalent desire by novelists to cultivate a sense of empathetic understanding and humane connection with others as a means of countering the moral indifference and isolationist perspectives of neoliberal ideologies and policies.

Lethal in Two Languages

This chapter explores the parallels and disjunctions between Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien, with particular reference to the extent to which formal experiment in both writers owes as much to the specific circumstances of Irish culture, politics, and language in the middle decades of the twentieth century as it does to European modernism and postmodernism. The chapter examines the centrality of both writers’ detailed knowledge of the Irish language and its narrative traditions to their experimental prose fictions. The chapter argues that Ó Cadhain’s insight into lives blighted by economic injustice and bureaucratic tyranny has lost little of its political urgency in the half-century since his death, while Ó Nualláin’s work continues to deride a world in which absurdity insists on being taken seriously and the distortion of language is a defining attribute of power.

‘Proud of Our Wee Ulster’? Writing Region and Identity in Ulster Fiction

This chapter discusses Northern Irish prose fiction in the decades after the partition of the island of Ireland in 1920. In doing so, it challenges critical perspectives that link the emergence of a distinctive tradition of Northern writing to the renewal of political violence in the late 1960s. The chapter explains that much Ulster fiction from 1920 onwards was concerned with exploring different manifestations of regional distinctiveness and the problematic of regional identity in a divided society. Works in which this difficult history is examined, by authors such as St John Ervine, Janet McNeill, Brian Moore, and Sam Hanna Bell, are critically scrutinized. The chapter also considers the tendency of critics to minimize Northern distinctiveness and contends that there is a continuum and a creative interplay in Ulster writing between the non-fictional and the fictional, and between historical discourse and the narrative imagination, which is too easily overlooked.

Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

Irish Crime Fiction

This chapter surveys the history of Irish crime fiction, a genre whose contemporary popularity tends to obscure its origins in the works of nineteenth-century writers including Gerald Griffin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and L. T. Meade. The discussion highlights some of the most significant works that lie along the broad spectrum of writing that ‘crime fiction’ occupies and, in so doing, reveals the plurality of ‘Irish’ crime fiction over the course of 180 years. Among the topics covered are the features that distinguish nineteenth-century Irish crime writing from its British counterpart; the emergence of Irish-language crime fiction in the early part of the twentieth century, and the defining features of contemporary Irish crime fiction, which has flourished domestically and internationally since the 1990s.

House, Land, and Family Life

This chapter examines representations of house, land, and family life in significant works of modern Irish fiction for children from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It analyses key narrative trends and explains how different manifestations of home are in dialogue with each other. With a focus on realist fiction, the chapter identifies notable touchstones and examines specific depictions of home, from the Big House to the thatched cottage; from gender construction within the domestic sphere to the collision of traditional and modern forces within the home; from diverse family structures in urban homes to fractured families during the conflict in Northern Ireland; and from the interweaving of private and public histories to the creation of sanctuaries for young adults. A chronological analysis of varying types of homes reveals the complicated cultural and social discourses at play in modern Irish children’s fiction.

Sex and Violence in Northern Irish Women’s Fiction

This chapter examines the ways in which Northern Irish women’s fiction written during and after the Troubles explores difficult and contentious themes, particularly those relating to emotional and sexual relationships conducted against the backdrop or memory of murderous violence. It argues that this body of fiction puts forward a critique that, while not always a direct comment on the politics of combat, represents a subtle intervention in the cultural life of the province. Focusing on works composed during the early 1980s and those published between 2006 and 2016, the analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Northern Irish women’s fiction unsettles the masculinist ideologies of nationalism and unionism. The discussion engages with a range of novels, from the Troubles writing of Linda Anderson, Brenda Murphy, and Anne Devlin through to more recent work by Lucy Caldwell, Bernie McGill, and Jan Carson.